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Friday, May 21, 2010

To extend library services to more patrons, many libraries operate bookmobiles, often run by library technicians. The technicians take trucks stocked with books, or bookmobiles, to designated sites on a regular schedule, frequently stopping at shopping centers, apartment complexes, schools, and nursing homes. Bookmobiles also may be used to extend library service to patrons living in remote areas. Depending on local conditions, the technicians may operate a bookmobile alone or may be accompanied by another library employee.

Library technicians who drive bookmobiles are responsible for answering patrons’ questions, receiving and checking out books, collecting fines, maintaining the book collection, shelving materials, and occasionally operating audiovisual equipment to show slides or films. They participate, and may assist, in planning programs sponsored by the library, such as reader advisory programs, used-book sales, or outreach programs. Technicians who drive the bookmobile keep track of their mileage, the materials lent out, and the amount of fines collected. In some areas, they are responsible for maintenance of the vehicle and any photocopiers or other equipment in it. They record statistics on circulation and the number of people visiting the bookmobile. Technicians also may record requests for special items from the main library and arrange for the materials to be mailed or delivered to a patron during the next scheduled visit. Many bookmobiles are equipped with personal computers and CD-ROM systems linked to the main library system, allowing technicians to reserve or locate books immediately. Some bookmobiles now offer Internet access to users

Anything in this world, there must be linkage and continuity between that one, with the other. Thus forming a dynamic life. Always in motion, friction, collision, and others as social beings who exist on this earth. Until such time came today. Everything has grown so extraordinary. Both of the economic, social, cultural, and others. As I had mentioned that everything on this earth must have something to do. All the fields that have been developed is, of course not far from what we call education.

It's good we see the world today. Technology has become so sophisticated. All human activities are made to be so easy. From the medical field, although there are still many that are still incurable disease. But, if we compare with previous periods, we now have so many advantages in the medical field. Previously, flu and fever alone can cause death to humans. However, not so with this now.

All the development was back again, we find that education is the basis of all these developments. All work must require mathematics. All work requiring the language of instruction. This present life, we need so much information that can support our work for a living regardless of age and gender.

These days now, so many channels that we can use to get the education. Books, internet, radio, television and other mass media other. And schools, including one of whom the most common among these educational channels.

No need to look at neighboring states. Immediately, we look in the mirror. What about our country. How governments respond to the state of education in our country?

As we know, our country has a number of problems in education. How not. So many people of Indonesia that could be said, under the medium economic level (including my time yes ^ ^ v). Many are not able to reach education. Unable to attend school, live displaced, there is also a meal once a day was grateful. How did they get a good education to change their future, so that fate does not make them desperate?

Of the many educational programs, only one who seems to attract my attention. Bookmobile. With this mobile library, of course, little more can help those who struggle to reach the information that is increasingly rising prices (the book).

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, that education is not limited by age, gender, or whatever. Everybody needs education, to improve the quality of life.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Rukia, aged 14, leaps forward excitedly at the books spread on the floor. She is orphaned, survives on a diet of tea, bread and maize and lives in the African bush in a home built of twigs and dried grass. Books give her a reason to hope.

I want to be a doctor when I leave school,' she says in flawless English. 'I want to help people who are sick. My parents died from tuberculosis when I was six. I hope they would be proud of me.'

Picking Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by the African writer Edward Muhire, Rukia Adhan knows that literacy is fundamental to achieving her ambition, and besides, 'reading is more interesting than anything else here'.

Her ramshackle school set amid the flat pine trees and red-brown sand of rural Kenya suffers a shortage of books, but every two weeks Rukia and her friends gaze out expectantly to the arid wilderness for an unusual saviour. It is a camel, which would be nothing extraordinary in this desert but for its cargo of 400 books for the children to borrow, enjoy and learn from.

Hopefully this can be reminded to always be grateful. And no longer complain of what is to be flaws. But I can make it as a strength. Remember the wise words of my teacher. Do not know whether he said it was wise for yourself or a quote. But I will always remember. "Where there is strength in weakness. And where there is weakness there is strength."

The Camel Mobile Library Service lends more than 7,000 books to nomads in Kenya's impoverished North East Province, often because camels are the only means of crossing the inhospitable terrain. Many of the books are supplied by Book Aid International, the charity which gives more than half a million books a year to some of the world's poorest countries - and is supported this year by the Observer Christmas Appeal.

The thread of possibilities such work offers children who otherwise have nothing was evident last week near Garissa. Five hours' drive from the capital, Nairobi, it is a place of rubbish-strewn streets, stenches, fetid swamps, watchful vultures, HIV street signs ('Abstain from indiscriminate sex'), shreds of binliners hanging from trees, homes patched up with rags and scrap metal, and carts pulled by emaciated donkeys. And this is the 'well off' part of town.

Beyond the clatter of an old typewriter at the Garissa Provincial Library is the humid office of Rashid Farah, the librarian in charge. The scale of his task is spelt out by a notice on the wall: 'The North Eastern Province has an illiteracy level of 85.3 per cent compared to the national figure of 31 per cent.'

Farah said: 'Most of the people around here need books but cannot afford them. The children are very enthusiastic and happy when they see the camel coming. It is now part of their lives. But we have almost exhausted the supply of books and we need more.'

Each morning three camels - one carrying two boxes of books, one loaded with a tent and one spare - set off from the library to one of 10 drop-off points in the predominantly Muslim province, where few adults ever visit a permanent library. Many are farmers forced into a nomadic existence by drought or famine: where their camels and goats go in search of pasture and water, they must follow, forcing their children to abandon school.

It was the turn of the village of Marmtu to welcome the camel mobile library last Tuesday. Life here has followed much the same rhythms for millennia: there is no electricity or running water and, although Kenya's mobile phone network offers a better signal than that in parts of Britain, no one has a handset to receive it. The houses, or manyatta, are tiny structures of dried grass and tree branches which can collapse in the rainy season. Women in vividly coloured robes draw water from a well and carry it in a jerry can on their heads or roll it forwards beneath their feet.

The children at Marmtu Primary School are visibly malnourished and not all can afford to buy from the mango seller who calls at lunchtime. The school, with 550 pupils aged from six to 16, needs basic tools if the cycle of poverty is ever to be broken.

Younger pupils are forced to share one textbook between four, while the older children have one between three. They are often in classes of 55 pupils to one teacher in rooms with bare concrete floors, or in crumbling mud brick huts where only crooked sticks supported the corrugated iron roof.

The school receives government funding of £400 a year. Wayu Kofa, the deputy head, said: 'We don't have enough books because the money we get from government is not enough to cater for all our needs, and parents are too poor to help - they struggle to pay for school uniform and see books as the last priority.'

Despite their circumstances, these children were not so different from any others as they gossiped, scrapped, kicked a football and chattered in Swahili, Somali or English.

There was excitement when the library camels appeared on the horizon, refusing to be hurried from their patient progress. The animals set down their cargo, and the staff from the Garissa Provincial Library assembled the tent, laid down mats and unpacked the books.

For the children who have no television, music or computer, the sight of a book offers the promise of escape and self-improvement. Soon they were scrambling over each other to get the latest delivery of titles ranging from How Pig Got His Snout, The Orange Thieves and Shaka Zulu to the more prosaic Practical Primary English, Comprehensive Mathematics and Improve Your Science and Agriculture

Among those eagerly queuing was Mohamud Abdi, 12. 'I get books from the camel as it's difficult to find them in school,' he said. 'I like reading because I want to be educated so I can get a job and help my family. My parents keep goats but don't have many. I want to be a teacher.'

Books save lives. Worldwide, it is estimated that this year alone failure to reach the United Nations' 2005 goal for educating girls means that more than a million mothers and children will die. These mothers are unlikely to find out about safe contraception and drinking water, or how to avoid disease in childhood.

The gender gap is stark but the camel mobile library is for both sexes. Eunice Okwero, 15, who was holding a copy of Motherless Baby, said: 'I like stories that tell me what happened in the past. When I leave school I want to join the library.'

The camel scheme is overseen by the Kenya National Library Service, a partner of Book Aid International, which supplies around 50,000 books to the country each year. Their joint activities also include training teachers to be school librarians, an Aids information awareness service and assistance for the visually impaired. The national library's acting director, Deborah Nyabundi, said: 'It's a painful experience when I look at these children. They want to eat, but they have nothing. They want to read, but they have nothing.

I believe it is our moral duty to help them. They have high ambitions and we don't want to kill those ambitions, but how will they become doctors without education? The best we can do for them is give them more, give them more. Do parents buy books when they can't afford meals to eat? No. That's why we're appealing to Observer readers for donations for books.'

Nyabundi summed up the philosophy of aid which helps people to help themselves. 'If you give a child a fish, you feed him only once. If you teach a child to fish, he is fed for ever. Book Aid International teaches you to fish so you are fed for ever.'

The Observer has teamed up with Book Aid International this Christmas to raise money for projects supporting reading and learning across Africa and Palestine.

The charity donates a huge range of books and learning materials to libraries, schools, hospitals and refugee camps, helping individuals realise their potential and contribute to the development of their communities.

Every £1.50 ensures that one more book reaches a reader - be it a child refugee gaining education for the first time or a midwife seeking advice about how to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV/Aids.

The first mobile library in Britain is thought to be the Warrington Perambulating library in 1859. This horse drawn vehicle was run by the Warrington Mechanics Institute to increase their annual circulation of books. The cost in the first year was £275 but the library lent nearly 12,000 books.

The first Bookmobile in the United States was developed by Mary Lemist Titcomb (1857-1932). While employed at the Washington County, Maryland Free Library, Titcomb was concerned that the library was not reaching all of the people it could. So, she worked on a plan for a book wagon. In 1905 the Washington County Free Library provided the first book wagon in the nation to residents by taking the books directly to their homes in remote parts of the county.

The Gerstenslager company specialized in building mobile libraries and similar vehicles in the 1950s.

The Internet Archive Bookmobile prints out-of-copyright books on demand, and in whatever type size is desired. The project has spun off similar efforts elsewhere in the developing world.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

I think, I wouldn't be a blogger unless my teacher Mrs. Agnes give me this kind of assignment. From the beginning... I'm so afraid, because I even don't know how to make a blog. I mean how to become a blogger... (Hope you understand!). But, God won't leave us with our problems. He helps me through my friend. Felicia Monica (who helps me makes my blog), Febria Roosita (who helps me edit my blog). That's the first.

The second, guess what is it?...We (me and my classmates) must choose a topic and link it with education... Oh my, I think how could it be. Honestly, nowadays I rarely watching TV even NEWS! Oh no... Now, I think I won't finish my last assignment. And, I don't know... why one day after Mrs. Agnes (my English language teacher) explain the assignment. I got a dream about "Indigo" and "bookmobile" at night. Because, i failed to link about Indigo and education in front of my teacher. I choose bookmobile. Even, my teacher give me a hint. But, from the hint, I can find another hint. Wow... Lucky me... :) Maybe this is also His help.

And now, the third. That is you.. who God sent to follow my blog :) and maybe give advice to make my blog better... SO, don't forget to follow my blog ya... :)